After
by RoodlyDoo
Summary: She sits in silence and refuses to acknowledge the neon wigs, the holographic dresses, the powdered ivory dolls stepping in front of her to preen for her attention. She taps her fingers on the immaculately polished stain glass of the table before her, and watches with a note of bitter satisfaction as her fellow victor makes an absolute ass of himself at the refreshments bar.


Itchy.

She feels itchy.

Her body is peppered with scrapes, bruises, bites and stings and a few rashes she's determined not to think about. There's a gaping stab wound in her leg that she's sure tears another inch across her flesh with every jerking step she takes, not that she can feel it.

Because all she can feel is this itch, just underneath the skin of her wrist, where they'd stuck her with a tracking jig four days ago.

Four days? Maybe five. She doesn't really care at this point, she's bound to give up and keel over soon. She considers it now, to lie down in the leaves and let the ground swallow her up. It looks so soft, so inviting.

But it would be stupid to give in now, before she actually succumbs to her injuries. She should give them a show, after all.

There's a muted exploding sound from nowhere and everywhere at once, and she counts back in her head. Twenty two. There's two of them left.

She almost wants to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all, she's a finalist. Of all the people they tossed into this arena, the foragers, the fighters, the monsters from district 2, she'd made it farther than all of them.

It doesn't matter now though. She'll die before she ever makes it to the cornucopia and whoever the other poor bastard is will win by default. This thought brings her a small measure of peace, for whatever reason, and she almost smiles. Almost, but she's so goddamn itchy.

Or rather, the itch has escalated to burning at this point and now she wonders if the sky is really darkening in front of her or if she's just starting to die. Finally.

Yeah, she thinks, squinting at the too-fast blackening of the horizon, she must just be losing consciousness. It's enough to convince her and she slows her pace to a shaky limp. She doesn't really want to look at her leg, but morbid curiosity turns her head downwards anyway. There's just enough light to see the wound, and it's either bigger than she thought or bleeding so much it looks like there's a fist sized hole in her leg. Picturing the absolute demon that had been Clove's knife, it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.

"Bitch," she croaks out-loud to no-one, and then a twig snaps behind her and she pivots awkwardly- her movement somewhat hindered by her wounded leg- to see the face of her soon-to-be murderer.

Cato.

He's not smiling, which for some reason is the most jarring part of his sudden appearance. He's just standing there, looking. She's not even entirely sure he's looking at her, the direction of his gaze is just a little skewed. His eyes look murky, like he's not even seeing anything.

The more she looks at him, the more he looks just a little off, more than before, anyway. She realizes why a moment later, when he sways to the side a bit and her eyes slip from his curiously blank expression to his neck, which is subtly, almost unnoticeably crooked sideways.

It's broken.

His neck is broken and he's still walking, and now that serene sense of pre-death apathy she'd been so ready to bask in moments before is gone and replaced by terror. There's no good reason for it, of course. It's that kind of terror borne out of the deepest parts of the subconscious, the kind that tells you to run screaming from an oddly shaped shadow or creaky house pipes.

She wants to run now, but a brief moment of stillness has the pain catching up to burning in her wrist has climbed up her arm and across her chest, a blazing fire encircling her neck and creeping into her lungs. Her head feels like it's being squeezed and her eyes are tearing up, blurring the already darkened space in front of her until the branches of the trees start to blend with his dirt-streaked face. She considers trying to fight it for a moment, but she's going to die either way, whether it's now or four paces from here.

So she tears her eyes away from his face and lets her legs buckle underneath her, trying in vain to swallow a groan as she feels the skin stretch around her stab wound. She may be a breathing corpse at this point but her pride is still intact; damn him, she won't make a sound when he kills her either.

The movement seems to startle him, jerking him out of his head. He slides that eerie, dead eyed stare straight and now he's looking right at her. She can feel it, but she refuses to make contact, she can't look at him again; even though it burns against her face like he's really touching her, even though there's a sick, masochistic part of her that wants to meet those eyes.

Her own start to droop and she can tell this is the end. She hears a thud, like a body hitting the ground, and her last thought before the darkness closes in is that maybe this will be the year they don't get their winner.

The thought makes her smile.


End file.
